See, a few years after playing a sexual predator on TV with Booker T’s wife, Kurt decided to try to make a career out of it, accepting the role of a depraved serial killer in the independent film, “End Game,” co-starring with former Survivor winner Jenna Morasca.

In this 2009 “thriller” written by McCartney James (who I’m guessing was born “James McCartney” before signing a developmental deal with WWE and suffering a name change), Kurt Angle plays Brad Mayfield, a serial killer who specializes in bedding dames and killing them at the climax. In the very first scene, he smothers a woman after handcuffing her to the bed post face down.

Kurt’s sex noises are bound to disturb anyone who remembers the “When Harry Met Sally” parody he did with Christie Hemme.

In the past, we are told, he has drowned a woman in a bucket of water during the act, leading a grizzled veteran of the police force to quip that he sent her “out with a bang.” (“Bang,” as in intercourse. You’ve got to hand it to anyone with three decades of violent crimes experience who still finds this double-entendre amusing and novel).

Later in the movie, Kurt finishes off his fling by giving her a broken freakin’ neck.

Kurt’s acting is certainly lacking, but his performance somehow outshines those of the rest of the cast. Besides, he gets a few unintentionally funny lines in here and there.

Jenna Morasca plays Carol, the roommate of Kurt’s first victim of the movie. Carol is a stripper who never actually strips, but her first passion was dance (which she also never does in this movie).

Jenna’s highlight of the whole film is her very first scene, where Kurt, fresh off murdering her roomie, poses as a detective for some reason to tell her all about it. He then seizes this perfect opportunity to ask her out. “Do you like Chinese food?” “No,” says Jenna, with a tone of disgust that seems directed not so much at the tastelessness of Kurt’s post-roommate-murder pick-up attempt, but at the idea of Chinese food. Yuk! Egg rolls!

And then there’s the film’s ostensible hero, officer Dan Burk, who combines the chiseled jaw and crew cut of Lance Storm with the dynamic energy of Lance Storm, phoning in lines like these.

Burk has a wife who’s kind of naggy and a young daughter who’s seen for 42 seconds (while sleeping) in the first two acts, but his family life is treated like an afterthought for much of the movie, allowing him to have an affair with Carol without a single character or scene in the rest of the film making this seem like a big deal.

But really, can you blame Burk for falling for the stripper with the heart of gold after watching her routine?

Sure, she basically just meanders around her stripper pole for five minutes in a nurse’s outfit, but compared to, say, Jenna’s TNA entrance, it’s a masterpiece of class and refinement.

In the last quarter-hour of the movie, Burk’s family suddenly becomes relevant when Kurt knocks out Burk’s wife and kidnaps their daughter, whom he takes aboard his secret boat. Carol is there too, tied up and gagged after being lured there unsuspectingly and finding out Kurt’s secret. It’s starting to become a very crowded boat.

The kidnapping of Burk’s daughter is especially heinous because, as one of many, many superfluous characters in the film explains, “she’s a special-needs child! That dirty son of a bitch!” I suspect the director needed an excuse not to let the little girl have any lines, so he made her character a non-verbal special-needs child. That dirty son of a bitch!

To get back the daughter he so dearly cares about for the last fifteen minutes of the film, Burk has got to boat his heart out to Kurt’s aquatic hideout. For some reason, the director decided that he needed to shoot the boat from no fewer than

nine

different

camera

angles,

shown

one

after

the

other.

Once Officer Burk uses his crime-solving boat to board Kurt’s kidnapping boat, he unties Carol, but then gets ambushed by Angle. Kurt puts a gun to his head and delivers one hell of a threat, vowing to give Burk’s wife “the love-making session she’s been dying for. Then I kill her too!” You don’t often hear the term, “love-making” in an angry homicidal rant. Perhaps Kurt’s character has been watching too many Newlywed Game re-runs on GSN. I’m surprised he didn’t say that he’d “make whoopee” with Carol.

Before Kurt can make good on any of his murderous or oddly romantic threats, he gets shot from behind by Carol, whom Burk has luckily just freed!

No, just kidding. The actual ending is far, far stupider than that, with the trigger being pulled by Burk’s daughter, who has never shown any awareness of her surroundings, has no experience with weapons, and is a special-needs child.

Burk gets off the boat with his daughter and gives his badge to Carol as a souvenir, abandoning the dangerous world of police work to pursue a career in his true passion, dance. No, wait, that was Carol’s true passion. Burk doesn’t have anything else going on in his life, other than his adulterous relationship with Carol, which it looks like he’s going to continue behind his family’s back. A truly heartwarming ending.

As bad as the movie sounds in summary, it’s even worse seen in action. There’s an overall amateurishness seen throughout the whole project. There are only two kinds of scenes in the movie: first, scenes with really obvious cuts that were clearly shot at two different times and spliced together haphazardly. Often, you can hear white noise that disappears when the camera angle changes, then returns when the angle changes back.

Then there are the really, really long shots where the camera stays completely still for minutes at a time while absolutely nothing of interest happens. For instance, there’s this scene where Officer Burk interviews an old lady for two minutes while she rambles on.

This is followed immediately by a scene where Jenna/Carol very slowly decides to get out of bed.

Elsewhere in the movie, Kurt shows up in a Jerry Lewis disguise to his victim’s funeral, where Burk asks him to show some identification. In one uninterrupted shot, we are treated to twenty seconds of Kurt stalling and fishing some ID out of his pocket. He does end up giving it up, rather than, say, refusing and not giving the police a major lead.

Besides the bad cinematography, the sheer number of sub-plots that are introduced and immediately dropped with no bearing on the main story leads this writer to believe that the film-makers were emulating The Room more so than any movie in the thriller genre.

For instance, there is this rambling interview with a priest about how, as a boy, Kurt’s character had “an affinity for dolls” (or, excuse me, “dawls”). Strange, then, that in the entire movie, there is not a single doll (or even a dawl). At least the trailer tries to connect this strange tangent to the rest of the film.

There’s Carol’s dance career, which her former dance instructor wants her to resume. He’ll work with her only if she’ll give up stripping, but, as she and her fellow strippers say, it pays the bills, so she keeps stripping and forgets about him for the rest of the movie.

There’s Carol’s roommate’s older lover, who tries to cover up his affair with the murdered woman by hiring his chauffeur to hire a burglar to break into Carol’s apartment. The viewers already know that this sugar daddy’s association with the dead woman is a complete red herring, but we still have to endure scene after scene of pointless and complicated shenanigans, with the only payoffs being a cliched dig at cops and donuts and this death scene that I swear isn’t from a Naked Gun movie.

There’s Kurt Angle’s job, where he is seen only once, on his last day at work, after he has set his apartment on fire to destroy evidence but before he goes into hiding. No one knows exactly what Kurt’s job was, but he apparently felt the need to put in another eight hours and leave a good impression on his boss before he went on the lam. Hey, in 2009’s economy, having good references on your résumé was an absolute must.

Similarities to The Room can be found elsewhere, as well, such as in this very uncomfortable (for the participants) sex scene on a staircase…

…or the strange temporal warps that occur when the screenwriter or director has lost track of what time it is in the scenes. Take this scene where Burk and his wife are woken up in the middle of the night by Angle, who is calling in broad daylight from six to eight hours in the future.

There’s more silliness to be found, like this dream sequence where a very blue Kurt Angle shows up at the hero’s funeral.

The expression that Smurf Angle has on his face as he shuts the casket lid is the same one Conan O’Brien had whenever he pulled his Walker lever.

Kurt has an unexplained expertise in disguises, twice dressing up as a slightly pudgier version of himself to speak with people who wouldn’t have recognized him to begin with. This leads to a Scooby Doo-esque “unmasking” scene…

There’s a scene where Kurt channels John Wayne Gacy and dresses as a clown, as if the serial killer cliche quota hadn’t already been met with the story about killing the cat. In this case, Kurt gains entry into the Burks’ home by tying up and posing as “Buffo, the World’s Strongest Clown,” which sounds like either a male stripper, a male prostitute, or Marcus Bagwell (a.k.a. “all of the above”).

Buffo, by the way, is a real clown.

There’s also a scene where Carol, fresh off stumbling upon Kurt’s photo collection of his victims, runs into him wearing a TNA Bound For Glory t-shirt. Kurt then says, and this couldn’t have been an accident, “What, you don’t like my company?” before slapping her to the ground. This, in the one scene in the whole film with an advertisement for his employer. I imagine Kurt said the same thing to Spike executives when they passed on a new TV deal for Impact Wrestling.

Real clunkers of lines abound, like when a very wordy Burk explains how a woman (smothered by Kurt Angle) died “from a severe lack of oxygen.” Not smothering, suffocation, or asphyxiation, but “a severe lack of oxygen.” It just seems like how an alien might talk about humans and their strange habits of “breathing.” But maybe I’m nitpicking here. Who really cares about bad dialogue when there are millions of people out there dying from a severe lack of food (otherwise known as “starvation”)?

I’m not trying to knock low-budget films. In fact, I’ve appeared as an extra in a few of them, such as President’s Day (available on Amazon!). It was shot for a few thousand dollars and looks ten times more professional than End Game, which cost about 200 grand — in part due to the countless extraneous characters given speaking roles, but also due to the casting of “name” “talents” Kurt Angle and Jenna Morasca. And to think that, had they just cast a different pair of leads, the filmmakers could have not only saved thousands of dollars, but also prevented Kurt from meeting Jenna and bringing her into TNA.

A wrestling fan ever since the days of Wrestlemania IX, Art graduated from college in the same building where Art Donovan called King of the Ring 1994. He also runs the "How Much Does This Guy Weigh?" blog, where he reviews New Generation-Era Monday Night Raws. Follow him on Twitter @Art0Donnell.
Email at: art@wrestlecrap.com

I was working at a Movie Gallery when this came out! I got to stock it and rent it out, to maybe 3 people. When the store was closing I stole a copy of it. Angle truly is a treat in it. Just awkward as hell.

I have heard about this movie and figured that it would be bad. I remember seeing it advertised on a Redbox and when I saw Kurt Angle in the picture, I thought to myself “Is he doing low budget movies now?” I knew that it would be a low budget movie, but then I read how bad it truly was.

I watched a video review of this. The guy tore this movie a new one. Seriously, who in the hell was the guy who played Burke? Why did he get a big role in the movie when this was practically his only movie credit? It said his name is Eric Wright. Well, to me, I only know of one other Eric Wright, and that is Eazy-E (RIP).